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Research Highlight: Understanding & Responding to the Transit Needs of Women
Understanding & Responding to the Transit Needs of Women
Canada’s first ever study on how women use transit recommends how to make public transit more accessible for its most frequent user
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By Priyanka Babbar, School of Urban and Regional Planning, University of Alberta & David Cooper, Principal, Leading Mobility Consulting
Experiences of women and men with transport systems differ, particularly when related to safety, personal security, frequency, accessibility, and affordability of transport. In more recent transport policy, gender has been emphasized as a priority in developing sustainable and inclusive transport systems. Prior to this advancement, however, a lack of systematic gender inclusion procedures in transport— anything from training of professionals to the design and planning of systems, services and equipment—has resulted in women’s distinct transport needs being overlooked in public transit planning and policy.
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What is the study?
During the pandemic, public transit served Canadians who relied on transit to access employment in the service sector, essential workplaces, health care and care giving, with women being the largest proportion of riders as identified in the Canadian Urban Transit Association’s (CUTA) COVID-19,PublicTransit,anda Green,InclusiveRecoveryStrategy(PDF, 1.8 MB). Transit agencies are experiencing changing travel patterns, particularly with ridership growth in off-peak periods, largely contributed by women riders.
The project team consisting of researchers from the University of Alberta and Polytechnique Montréal, augmented by transportation planners at Leading Mobility Consulting, sought to glean insights on how women take public transit and how Canadian transit agencies can orient and allocate service to better meet the needs of women.
We took on this project to seek to understand:
1.The differentiated needs and experiences of women’s travel and the factors that explain those differentiated needs 2.The current practice of considering women’s distinct travel needs in public transit planning in
Canada, including available data that are collected by transit agencies and methods to analyze these data.
The primary focus of the report is the travel behaviour and needs of women and female-presenting peoples. Despite comparisons between men and women, we acknowledge that gender and gender-based analysis are not confined to a binary perspective. We also recognize that women is not a homogenous term; therefore, the analysis of women as one group is not intended to take away from the lived experience of BIPOC, disabled, migrant, or LGBTQIA+ women who individually have varying travel needs.
The study included an inductive literature review of Global North grey and academic documents and a systematic policy review of 18 transit systems from Canada’s eight largest Census Metropolitan Areas (CMA’s). There is considerable cross-over between academic and practitioner-driven research; therefore, understanding the current state of both fields and identifying trends in the knowledge and subsequent gaps was very important. A webinar discussion with industry leaders from across North America was also conducted to highlight the processes between policy and operations. This approach enabled us to synthesize the current state of knowledge and practice regarding women’s distinct travel needs and behaviours and to identify opportunities to promote gender inclusivity in future research and public transit policies.
Trends in the public transit needs of women
Women are known to have a greater reliance on public transit. In Toronto in 2016, 44.3% of women used public transit as their primary commute mode to work as opposed to 30.1% of men; the Toronto Transit Commission also identified that 57% of its riders are women. Similar trends are found in Vancouver and Montréal, where 35.0% and 26.0% of women used public transit as their primary mode on their commute in 2016 as opposed to 24.6% and 18.7% of men who did, respectively. This reliance is based on a multitude of factors such as lower car priority within households, lower acquisition of driver’s licences, and lower incomes).1,2
1 Drimonis, T. (2016, February 17). Rethinking public transit to meet women’s needs. Ricochet. 2 Los Angeles Metro. (2019, August 30). Understanding How Women Travel.
VIDEO HIGHLIGHTS
The webinar discussion with leading women in the public transit industry conducted as part of this study is available to watch on YouTube here. In addition, the project team has put together a video highlighting their report, its findings, and its significance to the transportation industry and communities across Canada. Watch it here.
Public transit systems are generally designed with a gender-neutral approach. Many public transit systems are organized to take large groups of people from the suburbs to the central business district in the morning (a.m. peak), provide movement within the central business district through the middle of the day, and then mobilize the same group of people back to the suburbs at the end of the workday.3These systems, however, are implicitly tailored to the predominantly able-bodied white male experience of travel and do not account for diversity in the spatial distribution or time distribution that characterizes women’s travel behaviour. Women are more likely than men to be conducting caregiving and home management related trips that are in close proximity to the home, so public transit systems that primarily provide service to the core of cities are less equipped to adequately transport women to their more localized needs.4,5 The gender-based social roles that determine women’s standing within families, workplaces, and broader society inherently impact their mobility. Therefore, women’s travel behaviours cannot be examined appropriately without the understanding and recognition of external pressures that influence travel purpose, mode, route, and time.
Women’s commonly greater time dedication to domestic work requires the need to consider trip chaining to efficiently complete activities.6 Similarly, domestic work and caregiving-related tasks impact when women can travel as the nature of the tasks along with barriers, such as crowding on public transit, push women to travel off-peak. These behaviours are then linked to women’s employment type. For women in part-time service-based work, their travel patterns
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3 Blumenberg, E. A. (2003). En-gendering Effective Planning: Spatial Mismatch, Low-Income Women, and Transportation Policy. University of California Transportation Center 4 Lang, J. (1992). Women and Transport. Urban Policy and Research, 10(4), 14–25. 5 Primerano, F., Taylor, M. A. P., Pitaksringkarn, L., & Tisato, P. (2008). Defining and understanding trip chaining behaviour. Transportation. 6 Hamilton, K., Jenkins, L., Hodgson, F., & Turner, J. (2005). Promoting gender equality in transport (Working Paper Series No. 34) (PDF, 1.3 MB). Equal Opportunities Commission.
(timings and routes) are less likely to fall within traditional 9-5 business hours nor within a singular location such as a central business district. The spatial distribution of employment and the greater burden of familial responsibilities borne by women restrict mobility resulting in shorter distance trips. Phenomena such as the Pink tax and gender wage gap paired with greater caregiving responsibility result in women being more likely (as compared to men) to trip chain, take mid-day or off-peak trips, and shorter distance trips. With the acknowledgement of these behaviours observed in the literature, public transit agencies—and transportation planning as a whole—would gain from taking a gender-based lens to planning and operations can better serve women’s travel needs.
Transit Policy in Canada
The policy review has revealed several trends in how the planning activities of public transit agencies in Canada consider the travel needs of women.
First, while many public transit agencies are implementing service improvements that are aligned with the public transit needs of women such as operating investments in off peak service, the policy surrounding these improvements is not explicitly presented as responses to women’s needs.
Second, many public transit agencies considered in our review do not have publicly available service standards or standards that explicitly reference women, which limits policymakers and planners in their accountability to maintain or improve services that meet the transportation needs of women.
Third, opportunities exist in the collection and use of gender data to understand the travel behaviour of women and to monitor the impacts of service changes. For instance, Household Travel Surveys, a primary tool for decision-making and a rich data source that is inclusive of gender information, have the potential to be further analyzed and gender-disaggregated to generate more insight on women’s travel behaviour and purpose across a variety of modes.
Finally, while the processes that guide major projects and planning highlight broad social impacts and the need for consultation practices that are representative of the population, our analysis reveals that there is growing recognition of the potential of genderbased analysis practices, specifically GBA+, to understand and respond to the specific travel needs of women.
Insights from female leaders within the public transit industry
Our study involved a knowledge mobilization webinar featuring four female leaders in transit planning from the Edmonton Transit Service, Société de transport de Laval, TTC Riders, and Los Angeles Metro. The discussion led to the following insights:
1.Leveraging Data Collection to Understand Women’s Unique Transit Needs
A gender-neutral approach to transit planning is misguided and does not reflect the diversity in trip planning differences between customer groups. Without collecting gender data, it is impossible for transit agencies to understand the unique ways women use their respective transit systems. Agencies should ensure customer satisfaction surveys are collecting gender data, as well as investigate opportunities to use smart card and other “big data” sources to understand women’s revealed travel patterns.
2. Uplifting Women in the Transit Industry and Leadership
Panelists discussed the importance of hiring and uplifting women at all levels across transit agencies. When women have a seat at the table from front-line operations through to leadership, their perspectives are more likely to be included in decision-making. Transit professionals in training should be learning about the needs of diverse groups, including women, and how intersectionality impacts their work. Transit leaders should study gender-based analysis to ensure they are incorporating it into their business decisions. When leaders are champions of gender equity, it builds trust with customers and staff.
3. Adding the Gender Lens to Operations, Policies, and Planning
Transit service standards and policies should be public for full transparency and specifically identify how they serve the needs of women. For example, crowding standards should be considerate of space for strollers or wheelchairs on board vehicles. Women are more likely to trip chain and make frequent, localized, offpeak trips, so changes such as increased all-day service frequencies benefit women. Service planning that solely focuses only on commutes to work in employment centres are a disservice to the diversity of trips made by women.
4. The Journey to Equity and Building Trust with Customers
All 18 transit agencies contacted for the study identified that serving the unique needs of women was important to them, but different agencies are at different points on this journey. Some have public policy documents stating their gender equity standards and priorities while others have just started exploring how gender impacts their services.
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FURTHER READING
Understanding and Responding to the Transit Needs of Women in Canada
Read the report summarized in this article for the full results of the study, more insights and recommendations, and a selection of best practices from transit agencies across Canada.
Los Angeles Metro’s Understanding How Women Travel study
A first of its kind by a transit agency in the United States, this report— summarized here—outlines womens’ travel behaviour trends, safety, access, reliability of service and information, and convenience and comfort in Los Angeles. The report and datawill inform the LA Metro’s Gender Action Plan to improve women’s travel experiences on their system.
How we can move forward together in addressing the transit needs of women
In acknowledging these travel patterns identified as predominant among women, public transit agencies and transportation planning should actively consider taking a gender-based lens to examine how the adaptation of public transit operations can better serve women’s travel needs. Similarly, academic research regarding the transportation needs and behaviours of women is still necessary, particularly within the Canadian context. A greater number of studies seeking to understand women’s travel motivators and barriers, and public transit’s fulfillment of those needs, would foster novel insights and substantiate existing findings across various contexts.
The synthesis of the academic and preliminary policy findings has led to the following recommendations: • Foster research partnerships between academics and practitioners to co-create knowledge and understanding of women’s travel behaviour • Explore novel avenues for gender-based data collection, including real-time and passive data • Leverage customer satisfaction surveys to collect additional gender-specific data on service attributes • Implement gender-informed metrics to service standards • Integrate gender equity evaluations into business cases and planning processes • Achieving gender parity in the public transit workforce
For public transit to provide equitable and accessible service, giving equal consideration to the needs of women and adapting traditional transportation planning practices is necessary. Understanding women’s travel needs and behaviours is fundamental to the equitable planning of transit systems.
Priyanka Babbar is a soon to be graduate of the University of Alberta’s Master of Science Urban and Regional Planning program. With a background in Biology, Priyanka’s interests have always been associated with the sustainability and health of communities. Priyanka has dedicated her time to researching how Canadian public transport systems can alter service provision in the most efficient and equitable ways.
babbar@ualberta.ca David Cooper is the Principal of Leading Mobility Consulting. David has held Senior Planner roles at Calgary Transit, City of Toronto, and TransLink in Metro Vancouver where he worked on transformative public transit projects. David’s current practice focuses on national level policy projects including pandemic ridership and funding recovery for transit agencies and advancing mobility innovation in our cities.
david@leadingmobility.com